MoueiX Files / France's 'Mr. Merlot' makes good on a promise to produce a top New World wine in Yountville -- only it's Cabernet Sauvignon

Linda Murphy, Chronicle Wine Editor

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, February 3, 2005

Photo: Craig Lee

Image 1of/5

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 5

Christian Mouiex, who directs Chateau Petrus in Bordeaux, Dominus in Yountville, Napa Valley and many other brands for his French winemaking family. This photo was taken at Dominus winery in Yountville. Photo looking out from the winery towards the vineyard.
Event on 12/10/04 in Yountville. Craig Lee / The Chronicle less

Christian Mouiex, who directs Chateau Petrus in Bordeaux, Dominus in Yountville, Napa Valley and many other brands for his French winemaking family. This photo was taken at Dominus winery in Yountville. Photo ... more

Photo: Craig Lee

Image 2 of 5

Christian Mouiex, who directs Chateau Petrus in Bordeaux, Dominus in Yountville, Napa Valley and many other brands for his French winemaking family. This photo was taken at Dominus winery in Yountville. Photo of Christian Mouiex in his vineyard with Dominus winery behind in the background.
Event on 12/10/04 in Yountville. Craig Lee / The Chronicle less

Christian Mouiex, who directs Chateau Petrus in Bordeaux, Dominus in Yountville, Napa Valley and many other brands for his French winemaking family. This photo was taken at Dominus winery in Yountville. Photo ... more

Photo: Craig Lee

Image 3 of 5

Christian Mouiex, who directs Chateau Petrus in Bordeaux, Dominus in Yountville, Napa Valley and many other brands for his French winemaking family. This photo was taken at Dominus winery in Yountville. Photo of Christian Mouiex working in his glass office in Dominus winery with the view of the vineyard.
Event on 12/10/04 in Yountville. Craig Lee / The Chronicle less

Christian Mouiex, who directs Chateau Petrus in Bordeaux, Dominus in Yountville, Napa Valley and many other brands for his French winemaking family. This photo was taken at Dominus winery in Yountville. Photo ... more

Photo: Craig Lee

Image 4 of 5

Photo of 2001 Dominus Napa Valley with a bottle of 2001 Napanook Napa Valley. Christian Mouiex, who directs Chateau Petrus in Bordeaux, Dominus in Yountville, Napa Valley and many other brands for his French winemaking family. This photo was taken at Dominus winery in Yountville.
Event on 12/10/04 in Yountville. Craig Lee / The Chronicle less

Photo of 2001 Dominus Napa Valley with a bottle of 2001 Napanook Napa Valley. Christian Mouiex, who directs Chateau Petrus in Bordeaux, Dominus in Yountville, Napa Valley and many other brands for his French ... more

Photo: Craig Lee

Image 5 of 5

Christian Mouiex, who directs Chateau Petrus in Bordeaux, Dominus in Yountville, Napa Valley and many other brands for his French winemaking family. This photo was taken at Dominus winery in Yountville. Photo of Christian Mouiex pruning the vines in his vineyard.
Event on 12/10/04 in Yountville. Craig Lee / The Chronicle less

Christian Mouiex, who directs Chateau Petrus in Bordeaux, Dominus in Yountville, Napa Valley and many other brands for his French winemaking family. This photo was taken at Dominus winery in Yountville. Photo ... more

Photo: Craig Lee

MoueiX Files / France's 'Mr. Merlot' makes good on a promise to produce a top New World wine in Yountville -- only it's Cabernet Sauvignon

1 / 5

Back to Gallery

When Bordeaux's "Mr. Merlot" arrived in Napa Valley in 1981, he said it would him take 20 years to make great wine from the famed Napanook Vineyard in Yountville.

Christian Moueix is a man of his word.

With the fall 2004 release of his Cabernet Sauvignon-based 2001 Dominus Napa Valley, Moueix has made good on his prediction, producing a brilliant wine that combines his Old World winemaking heritage with the experience gained by working with New World fruit for 20 years.

It has taken two decades for Moueix to learn every cranny of the Napanook Vineyard, replant it, wait for new vines to mature and adjust to making Cabernet Sauvignon instead of Merlot. While Dominus has steadily improved since the first vintage in 1982, the 2001 version truly marks Dominus' arrival as a classic, age-worthy Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.

The 2001 Dominus ($121) is ripe and rich in the California style, yet elegant and slightly restrained a la Bordeaux. It has supple tannins, refreshing natural acidity, low (for California) alcohol percentage (14.1) and flavors and aromas of forest floor, licorice, baking spice and dried herb. Moueix's judicious hand with French oak barrels (just 30 percent of them are new each vintage) brings all the components of the wine into a complex Cab that should stand the test of cellar time.

For Moueix (moh-EX) -- the man also in charge of Chateau Petrus, the exalted Merlot producer in Bordeaux's Pomerol region that commands $600 per bottle for current releases -- taming Napanook wasn't easy. Early vintages of Dominus were hard and astringent, panned by critics. The 1982 and 1993 vintages were so troublesome that Moueix did not release wines from those years. Yet he had one of Napa Valley's most famous vineyards, a saber-sharp winemaking mind, plus resolve, patience and money.

"When I visited the ranch in 1981, it was a rainy day," says Moueix, 57. "I always love to see the vineyards in winter, because you can see the spacing, the soils, the slope and how the vineyard drains. Good drainage is critical.

"The climate is perfect to make wines of elegance. I love the soil and the jewel-box sort of valley. The gentle slope of 3 to 5 percent is perfect. I get no feeling from (vineyards on) hillsides and mountains, but I saw Napanook as perfect. It gave me a special feeling from the first day.

"We had the chance to make the (first-growth Bordeaux) Haut-Brion of Yountville; I knew that I should not miss the opportunity."

Opportunity first came when Robert Mondavi introduced Moueix to Robin Lail and Marcia Smith, daughters of the late John Daniel Jr. Daniel, former owner of Inglenook Winery, and his family kept the 140-acre Napanook Vineyard, planted in the mid-19th century, after Inglenook was sold in 1964. Lail and Smith inherited Napanook and took Moueix into their fold in 1982. They called their partnership the John Daniel Society and named the wine Dominus, which means "God" in Latin; Moueix, a lover of the Latin language, liked the way Dominus sounded and how it looked on the bottle.

Smith and Lail (who also was a partner in Merryvale) sold their shares in the property to Moueix in 1995.

Over time, Moueix and his general manager, Jean-Marie Maureze, pampered the vineyard as one would a child. They pulled out Chardonnay and planted more Bordeaux varieties. Vines were pruned and trellised so that the right amount of sunlight hits the grapes. In the early years, they severely limited the yields, as was Moueix's practice at Petrus; he learned, however, that a bigger crop load was best for the Napanook vines.

Moueix learned to deal with Cabernet Sauvignon, a thicker-skinned, more tannic, later-ripening variety than Merlot. While most Bordeaux producers use at least some Cabernet Sauvignon, Petrus has 95 percent Merlot and 5 percent Cabernet Franc planted on its precious land.

To control vigor, he decided not to irrigate the vines, relying on underground springs for moisture. Cool morning and evening breezes sweep over Yountville from the Mayacamas Mountains, encouraging the grapes to develop firm natural acidity, thus eliminating the need to add acid. Clusters get a spritz bath of water just before harvest to freshen them up.

There are now 14 different blocks within the 124 acres at Napanook, a mix of older and younger plantings and some old, phylloxera-resistant St. George rootstock from Inglenook days.

"With my Merlot education, I planted too much of it (at Napanook)," Moueix says. "It's taken 20 years to get to the mix I think is correct -- 80 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, 10 Petit Verdot, 5 percent Merlot and 5 percent Cabernet Franc. Now I know that Cabernet Sauvignon is the wine to make from here.

Learning from mistakes

"In the early vintages, the wines were tannic and needed time," Moueix says. "I made some mistakes." Then he made adjustments, such as reducing the time the grape skins stay in contact with the fermented must to prevent overextraction of bitterness from skins and seeds.

Moueix greets me halfway down the long cement walkway from the Dominus parking lot to the winery, with a broad smile and extended hand. He is charming and loquacious, impeccably polite. He asks if I'd like to walk the Napanook Vineyard and seems genuinely pleased when I say yes.

His manner is part friendly businessman, part proud father. If ever a Frenchman were to fit into Napa Valley, it's Moueix. Yet from all reports, he's a very private man. His graciousness and European manner guard against too close an inspection, too prying a look. As one Napa Valley winemaker says privately, "I think the only person who knows what's going on in Christian's head is Christian."

Swanson Vineyards winemaker Chris Phelps was the Dominus winemaker from 1984 to 1996. In 1982, while working as an intern for Moueix in Bordeaux, Phelps was invited to have a glass of Champagne with the vintner.

'A maniac of details'

"At that time, Christian described himself as 'a maniac of details,' " Phelps says. "I found him to be brilliant; he might even be a genius. He has business acumen and a great sense of wine that has sharpened over the years. Yet he's very private. Today, I don't think he uses a computer; he has it all in his head. He keeps track of all the minutiae - not in a controlling way, but so that everything adds up."

Moueix will shun tradition if it means making a better wine.

After earning an agricultural engineering degree in Paris, he studied viticulture and enology at UC Davis -- an unheard-of practice at the time. What could California possibly teach a Frenchman about winemaking?

At Petrus in the early 1970s, he was one of the first Bordeaux vintners to remove bunches from the vines before harvest (called green harvesting). He believed that a heavier crop load meant less intensity in the fruit, so he removed unripe clusters to allow the vines to pump all their energy into the remaining grapes. The Bordelais thought Moueix was crazy for dumping profits onto the ground; now it's standard practice.

His organic farming methods introduced others to the benefits of eschewing chemicals and planting cover crops that become natural fertilizers. He hired helicopters to be flown over the vineyard to dry out rain-soaked vines with the wind generated by their rotors.

Then there is that washing of the grapes before they're picked, a practice few, if any, other grapegrowers in the world keep. In Napanook, two women follow a sprayer-bearing tractor down each row, applying a fine mist of water onto the clusters.

Contrary to the claim by James Conaway in his 1992 book, "Napa," that Moueix wanted to sleep in the Napanook Vineyard "to become one with the vines" but was scared off by reports of rattlesnakes, Moueix did spend a night in Napanook, in spring 1982, emerging unbitten.

Says Moueix, "It was a romantic approach to get the 'feeling' of the place, the spirit of the ancestors, including the old Indian camp that was there."

His Dominus winery, built in 1997, is another testament to Moueix's out- of-the-box thinking. He hired Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron (who designed the new M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco) to create a 50,000-square-foot, $5 million structure next to the Napanook Vineyard, visible on the west side of Highway 29, just north of Yountville.

Some 460 feet long and 82 feet wide, the building has mortarless walls constructed of galvanized cages, called gabions, that are filled with dark- green basalt rocks quarried in American Canyon. The small gaps between the rocks allow light and air to enter the winery -- a breathing building that stays cool in summer. Glass-enclosed offices face the vineyard. The drab colors and hulking rectangularity of the winery drew gasps from locals as it was going up; Dominus now seems to have grown into the landscape.

"People say our building is like a Stealth bomber that landed in the vineyard," architect Herzog said at the grand opening in '97. "You don't see it until it's too late."

"At first I was skeptical (about the design)," Moueix says. "I was told that this type of insulation was better than air conditioning, as it's important for the wines to have as little temperature variation as possible. We have a small air conditioning system, but we have to turn it on only a couple times a year."

Famous profile

Moueix was also concerned about the use of his portrait on the first eight Dominus vintages, each label created by a different artist. He was, after all, a Frenchman in Napa Valley, a region suspicious of outsiders and on the lookout for inflated egos. Marketers convinced him that the portraits underscored the recognizable name "Moueix."

"Wayne Thiebaud painted the last portrait, for the 1990 Dominus," Moueix says. "It was a label I was happy to retire." Today bottles bear his signature but not his face.

Lail, who with her husband, Jon, founded Lail Vineyards in Rutherford after selling her Dominus shares to Moueix, says the man from Pomerol shouldn't have worried about image, as he was immediately accepted when he arrived in Yountville. Among his early supporters were Mondavi, Warren Winiarski of Stag's Leap Wine Cellars and Koerner Rombauer of Rombauer Vineyards.

"He is a very charming man, and was very quiet about himself when he arrived," she says. "From Christian's days at UC Davis, he had made many friends in the valley and had connections."

Partnering with Moueix was emotional, says Lail, who grew up at Napanook and loved to drive through the property with her father when she was a child, learning to identify the grapes.

"So many positive things came out of the relationship with Christian," Lail says. "It was a blessing. Working with him was a fabulous education and I consider him a valued friend.

"But we're very different people. I'm forthcoming, and I believe that whatever you share comes back to you in hearts and spades. Christian is a very private man; it's not in his nature (to open up). We were a different combination of people (to stay in business together). Yet he is quite remarkable and I love what he's done with the property."

Born with advantages

Moueix's late father, Jean-Pierre Moueix, was a wildly successful Bordeaux wine merchant and owner of several chateaux (see "Up close: Christian Moueix") who turned management of his Etablissements Jean-Pierre Moueix company over to Christian and other family members in 1978. Petrus is not only their flagship wine, it's one of the most famous and sought-after in the world, earning ridiculously high prices at auction.

Petrus is a mere 30 acres, producing 4,000 cases of wine a year from soils of dark clay and deep-lying iron. Napanook's current 124 acres of mostly gravel and clay loam soils produce 10,800 cases - 7,000 of the 2001 Dominus ($121) and 3,800 of 2001 Napanook ($47), the latter a slightly lighter Cabernet Sauvignon blend made from younger vines.

The Gironde River divides Bordeaux's Right Bank, home to Petrus in Pomerol, from the Left Bank of the Medoc and its famous first-growth chateaux - Lafite-Rothschild, Latour, Mouton-Rothschild, Margaux and Haut-Brion. When Napoleon III initiated Bordeaux's wine classification system in 1855 -- based on quality and, today, still antiquatedly in place -- the Right Bank was overlooked, because crossing the river was too much trouble for the traders who compiled the list.

Thus, Petrus, as great as any of the Left Bank's first growths, is referred to as a "famous growth," and the wines of Pomerol remain without official classification.

Moueix is not the first Bordelais to make wine in Napa Valley, and his entry did not make as big a splash as the Mondavi-Baron Philippe de Rothschild Opus One 1979 partnership in nearby Oakville. Dominus won't ever be Petrus, yet in 20 years, Moueix has created his own "famous growth" from one Napa Valley's oldest and most revered vineyards.

Up close: Christian Moueix

Age: 57

Based: Napa Valley and Libourne, France

Owns: Dominus Estate in Yountville.

Owns, with family members, and directs Etablissements Jean-Pierre Moueix in Libourne (Bordeaux), which owns numerous chateaux, including Chateau Petrus. The company also manages several other French properties.

Personal: Wife Cherise; son Edouard, 28, works for the company; daughter Charlotte, 26, is a large-animal veterinarian in South Africa.

Moueix family-owned brands, with approximate retail prices, include:

CALIFORNIA

Dominus Napa Valley ($121)

Napanook Napa Valley ($47)

FRANCE

Chateau Hosanna Pomerol ($100)

Chateau La Fleur-Petrus Pomerol ($60)

Chateau Lagrange Pomerol ($30)

Chateau La Grave Pomerol ($35)

Chateau Le Prieure St.-Emilion ($37)

Chateau Magdelaine St.-Emilion ($80)

Chateau Petrus Pomerol ($600)

Chateau Trotanoy Pomerol ($75)

Christian Moueix Bordeaux Merlot ($10)

-- Linda Murphy

Tasting Dominus and Napanook

Maturity can turn a gangly, pimply faced teen Cabernet Sauvignon into Prince Charming. Although many California Cabernets are consumed soon after release, a recent vertical tasting of Christian Moueix's Dominus Estate wines demonstrated that Cabernet Sauvignon, with time, can shed its adolescent awkwardness to become a complete, balanced wine.

1987 Dominus Estate Napa Valley -- Fresh blackberry nose leads to ripe black-fruit flavors. Hints of brush, cedar and vanilla add interest to a wine on which Moueix was still learning the California winemaking ropes and his Napanook Vineyard. Time has tamed the once-astringent tannins. Enjoyable now.

1989 Dominus Estate Napa Valley -- This rain-plagued vintage took its lumps from critics, yet some fine wines were produced by the more experienced vintners -- especially one like Moueix, accustomed to Bordeaux's frequent wet growing seasons. Moueix turned out a fine wine in 1989 that is still very much alive, with solid black cherry and cassis aromas and flavors and pretty notes of anise and cigar box. It's not amazingly complex, yet still it's delicious. Drink soon.

1990 Dominus Estate Napa Valley -- Still tight and firmly tannic, with an earthy/mushroomy nose and solid black-fruit, cassis and licorice flavors. Should round out with further cellaring.

1991 Dominus Napa Valley -- A classic Napa Valley vintage and Cabernet Sauvignon. Ripe and powerful, with black cherry, cassis and plum flavors and obvious notes of anise and black spice that are typical of Napanook Vineyard grapes. Oak and vanilla are definitely in the background. While mouthfilling and quite enjoyable now, it will be interesting to track this wine's progress in five years.

1994 Dominus Napa Valley -- With all the hullabaloo over the 1995 California Cabernets, I'm just as impressed with the 1994 and 1996 vintages, and the Dominus wines from these years are prime examples. The 1994 is dense and intense, with complex notes of black cherry, tobacco, coffee and dark chocolate. The key to this wine is its great balance and verve -- lively acidity that not only makes it a refreshing match with food, but also extends its life in the cellar.

1996 Dominus Napa Valley -- Not quite as big as the 1994, the 1996 vintage is charming for its unabashedly bright blackberry and black cherry palate and chocolatey character. It's not so much lush as it is elegant and integrated, with a wonderful balance of oak, fresh fruit and natural acidity, plus silky tannins.

1999 Dominus Napa Valley -- Get past the firm tannins and this wine shows very complex notes of black cherry, cassis, dark plum, chocolate, vanilla, anise and dark spice. Rich yet somewhat brooding, with a mouth- coating texture and judicious use of toasty oak. Should mellow and improve over the next 15 years.

2001 Dominus Napa Valley ($121) -- Ripe and rich in the California style, yet elegant and refreshingly acidic and with plenty of Bordeaux-style forest floor, baking spice and dried herb aromas and flavors. Toasty oak plays a supporting role. Tannins are obvious yet supple; the wine will benefit from cellaring for up to 10 years - maybe more - yet is enjoyable now for those who love young red wines.

2001 Napanook Napa Valley ($47) -- Made mostly of Cabernet Sauvignon, this "little sister" to Dominus comes from younger vines in the Napanook Vineyard and thus is a bit lighter than its cellar-destined sibling -- quite drinkable now, yet with the tannic chops to mellow with some age. Its bright black cherry and blueberry aromas and flavors meld with hints of chocolate and cigar box into a wine that is complex yet smooth.

-- Linda Murphy

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.